Hell's kitchen

When the world's most unlikely restaurateur to the stars,
Elaine Kaufman, died last year, it spelled the end of an era in New
York nightlife. Here, one former diner recounts how an irascible,
hostile, working-class Jewish girl became the proprietor of the
world's most exclusive eatery and changed the A-list's taste in
hospitality for a generation.

I used to think that a particularly cruel act of condescension
and mockery was involved in the embrace by writers and editors of
Elaine Kaufman, the most celebrated restaurateur of her era in New
York, who died, to great fanfare, this winter.

She would slog through her restaurant, Elaine's on the Upper
East Side, like a punch-drunk prizefighter, or a low-class madam,
or public-house wench vastly past her prime, more threatening than
hospitable, muttering discordant and guttural oaths, and, given her
size, taking up far more space than the front room in her narrow
establishment could afford.

I remember the great panic I felt whenever she headed towards a
table I might be sitting at. First, not staring at her in horror
required a special effort; then, whatever conversation might have
been going on had to stop and another special effort had to be made
to include this loud, stupid, uncomprehending woman, interested
only in her own bar. Her baying voice was a particular slow chalk
on a blackboard.

So I thought the obvious: this is a joke. Nobody enjoys this.
It's at her expense. She's a grotesque. She's the freak show.
Everybody's slumming.

I can hear her voice drilling through my head.

A name-dropper's evening in the Seventies: Woody Allen and
Marshall Brickman with Susan Braudy, the most beautiful woman of
that era in the literary world, who the two collaborators will
squabble over, and about whom write the movie Manhattan;
Mikhail Baryshnikov (or was he merely at the next table, leaning
into ours); me; and Elaine. Here is the only line of dialogue I
remember from that night, partly because Elaine repeated it so
often: "Doncha like the meat, honey?"

And 30 years later, at a table with Christopher Hitchens and Graydon Carter,
Elaine hovering, and repeating: "That meat's good, innit?"

Elaine's represents a particular phase in the history of New
York restaurants. It's the first whiff of self-consciousness. It's
a restaurant as you might imagine a restaurant to be, instead of a
restaurant being a business that merely conformed to the standards
and requirements of the restaurant business (laundered table
cloths, professional waiters, furniture bought from the restaurant
supply store: red-sauce Italian; escargot French; steak or chops
American). Now all restaurants in New York are in pastiche style -
Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn; the Lion; Keith McNally's Minetta
Tavern (all, in their way, imitations of Elaine's).

Before Elaine's, restaurants that catered to society, as it was
then construed, were either morbidly respectable French types,
old-line clubs, or mob establishments with a show-biz
tilt.

Jilly's was Jilly Rizzo's joint on West 52th Street and Rizzo
was Frank Sinatra's personal body man. Jilly's was the home of the
Rat Pack and was the Sinatra club house when Sinatra was in New
York.

Elaine, with a little critical interpretation, was Rizzo. Or, at
least, she begins to make sense if you see her as Rizzo - a Rizzo
to the bookish publishing boys who originally constituted
Elaine's.

This, too, was a late-Sixties-early-Seventies change. Nightlife
in New York used to be run by Broadway types, promoters, press
agents, night-on-the-town big spenders, Holly Golightly girls and a
more or less respectable criminal element. But then Broadway faded
and was replaced by media, people from publishing houses, magazines
and television, Ivy Leaguers, increasingly more corporate than
creative, trying to be Broadway types.

Elaine had a specific role to play in this new circle: she was
the working-class Jewish girl with a bohemian bent - from the
outlaying boroughs to Greenwich Village, finally landing on the
fringes of the Upper East Side. She favoured the working-class part
over the bohemia. She was a New York cab driver personality. A
Toscanini of crassness.

Elaine may have been the last working-class Jew in New York.

Curiously, Elaine's was always kind of a WASP place. In the
Sixties and Seventies, New York was still culturally regimented.
The Jewish writers and editors who dominated the intellectual life
of the city were firmly on the West Side. The WASP writers and
editors who dominated the social life were on the East Side. The
bohemian and gay writers and editors remained in the Village.
Anyway, the WASP writers and editors could have dinner with the
Misses in townhouses off Lexington Avenue, and then go out for a
smoke and turn up at Elaine's.

So perhaps the relationship with Elaine was part of the
complicated relationship between WASPs and Jews in New York. For
the fading WASPs, Elaine was an amusing bridge to the new vulgar
world - a bit of verve on Second Avenue.

And then there was Woody Allen. It is difficult to remember that
Allen ran the social life of the city for a decade or more. He was
the ultimate crossover Jew - indeed, he made the Upper East Side
his own. Almost all the restaurants and bars he frequented became
the places everybody else wanted to be. Woody went to lunch at the
Russian Tea Room and the media world followed. He went to the
Carnegie Delicatessen and so did everybody else. And he went to
Elaine's just about every night.

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff is a contributing editor for British GQ and Vanity Fair. He is also a columnist for USA Today, the author of four books and the founder of Newser.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Michaelwolffnyc